by Julie Miller
“Oooh.” She shivered with revulsion, remembering that lip-lock assault with the same fondness of her last trip to the dentist. “Of all the nerve.”
She dug her keys from her tote as she hurried to her car, anxious to get home and start her next column. The patrons of Groucho’s Pub had given her plenty of raw material to work with. Already she could generate columns about awkward pickup lines made all the less endearing when uttered in the form of a command or wishing for substance behind dashing good looks.
J.C. halted a few feet from the rear of her Camaro and routinely checked underneath her car and the one parked beside it before sliding between them. At the very least, she could write a paragraph about not needing to primp to pick up a soldier. She’d worn nothing more provocative than jeans and a gray knit shirt with three-quarter sleeves. Yet she’d received no fewer than seven compliments about how nice she looked.
“Hey, baby.”
J.C. froze with her key in the lock at the inebriated drawl behind her. Her evening had just gone from mildly amusing and mostly annoying to downright awful. Gorilla-boy had followed her to her car.
She fixed a superior sneer on her face and turned to face him. She froze. Forget awful. Make that scary. Gorilla-boy had brought a friend with him. Both were drunk, both were ogling her breasts and parts south. And she was trapped.
Panic flared in her chest and tried to strangle her throat, but she fought back the urge to scream and opted for sarcasm instead. “If I’m not interested in one of you, I’m not going to be interested in two.”
“I know you want me.” The black-haired man who’d introduced himself as Juan—make that Don Juan—Guerro entered the slot between the cars and backed her up against the concrete parking barrier. “I saw you write down my name after I left.”
“No. I—” He snatched her bag off her shoulder, and though she struggled to hang on to it, he pinched her wrist in a way that shot pain up her arm and made her fingers refuse to work. “Ow. Jeez.”
He easily pried the bag from her limp grasp and tossed it to his sidekick. “Check it out.”
“That’s stealing.” But her argument fell on amused ears.
While Juan’s buddy dumped out her bag on her trunk and rifled through her things, Juan himself kept hold of her wrist and turned her so that she butted against the hood of her car. He moved forward, sliding one of his legs between hers and leaning over her in such a way that she could smell beer and cigarettes on his stale breath.
“Find the book, Manuel. See what fine thing she said about me.”
Oh, God. If he could decipher shorthand, seeing prick next to his name would hardly endear her to him. She was in trouble. J.C. flattened her hands against his chest and shoved. “I told you no, and I meant no.” He stumbled back into the neighboring car, giving her a chance to go after her bag. She waved an accusatory finger at the sidekick who was rudely touching her things and tossing them aside. “I will call the cops and have you arrested for purse snatching.”
But Juan was a trained Marine. Drunk or not, he was still physically stronger and swifter than she would ever be cold sober. He grabbed her arm and jerked her back against the car. Her elbow smacked against the sideview mirror.
“Ow!”
He thrust his groin against her hips and pressed his cold gorilla lips to her ear. “I’m saving you from your shyness.”
Shy? Her?
“Stop it!” J.C. twisted and aimed with her knee, but she was pinned beneath his hips and hands and that awful tongue. She curled her fingers into claws and scratched at his forearm, but it was hardly enough damage to free herself. If he angled his head just a little farther, she would chomp down on his ear.
“Hey, Juan.” His sidekick must have found her notebook. “This don’t make no sense. It’s all numbers and scribbles. If your name’s here—”
The sidekick fell silent with a startled oof. The car shook behind her as he slammed into the trunk of her car and then collapsed to the ground.
“What the—?” Juan muttered and lifted his head.
“Get your hands off her. Now.”
If Gorilla-boy wasn’t intimidated by the deep-pitched precision of that order, she was.
She shoved him as he turned to the commanding voice, and scuttled back against the wall, away from the unwelcome contact with his body. Juan looked stunned to see his buddy curled up in a ball on the asphalt, holding his bloody nose. “Manny? What the hell?”
J.C. saw him before Juan did. A tall, broad, golden hunk of hero materialized at the back of her car. He was gathering up her things and dropping them into her bag, all without looking away from Juan or even blinking his battleship-gray eyes. “Your ears work?” he challenged.
Juan bristled. “You mind your own business, old-timer. I saw the lady first.”
Old-timer? J.C. recognized the broad-shouldered man from the bar. She’d caught him staring at her with such intensity that she’d forgotten the military shave of his head and the stiff carriage of his shoulders and responded to the hungry appreciation in his eyes. He was fit and strong and might even be handsome if he ever relaxed the rugged lines of his face and smiled.
But there was no mistaking him for old. Serious, yes. Authoritative, definitely. He was a mature man in the prime of his life. And he’d wanted her.
“What unit are you two with?” he demanded.
The terse trade-off of information continued as J.C. relived those few tension-fraught moments at the bar when she realized she’d lusted after a man who made her forget her purpose for being there. Those few charged moments had been about sex and desire and long-denied need.
The tips of her breasts had tingled and her panties had gotten damp. All because he’d looked as if he’d wanted to bed her on the spot. Without saying a word, it had been the most straightforward invitation of the evening. And the most flattering. The raw desire flooding his expression had caught her off guard. First base and beyond had been a real possibility for a moment.
But a split second later, she’d wondered if that was the same kind of inexplicable attraction her mother had felt when she’d met her father for the first time. Remembering her mother’s pain, she’d finally found the strength to look away.
“If you want to stay a corporal, you’ll move aside.” That clipped, low-pitched voice brought her instantly back to the here and now. “Honey?”
The blond man’s gaze slid beyond Juan’s stunned posture and swept over her. He extended a large, trim-fingered hand toward her and urged her to come out from between the cars and join him. Honey?
She’d just mentally complimented the man on his honesty. What game was he playing now? Had she missed something important? She bought herself a moment by playing along. “Sweetie?”
“Come out of there,” he urged her again.
This time, with Juan’s dark-eyed scowl over his shoulder to remind her of the danger she’d been in, she scooted around Gorilla-boy and reached for her rescuer’s outstretched hand. She fixed a smile on her face. “I’m glad you showed up.”
That much was true. But the charade was going to be more than just verbal. He handed her her bag and slipped an arm behind her back, claiming her as his own, carefully angling her away from the moaning man with the bloody nose and Juan’s cautious advance.
“Are you telling me she’s yours?” Juan challenged.
“You questioning my word?” Her sweetie’s hand settled with a possessive grip on her hip and he pulled her snug against the mile of hard, muscular lines that formed his thigh, waist and chest. Yowza. J.C.’s sex drive kicked in, remembering everything he had promised in that long, heated stare earlier.
“No, sir.” Juan took another, more hesitant step forward. “But you two weren’t together inside. And I wasn’t the first guy to hit on her.”
Setting aside her libido, J.C. understood the game plan now. “So we had a little fight and I wanted to make him jealous. I’d still rather go home with him than with you.”
She wrappe
d her arms around sweetie’s flat waist and sidled impossibly closer. Was that a tremor she felt go through him? Or her own body’s involuntary response?
“What’d you say about me in that notebook?” Now Juan was addressing her. “It ain’t cool to lead a man on like that.”
“Lead you on?” J.C. puffed up. “I told you I wasn’t interested and you planted a kiss on me like that was going to change my mind.”
“That’s when I decided I’d had enough.” Her rescuer had the most deliciously possessive timbre in his voice. “I’m the only man who gets to kiss her. Now beat it while you still can.”
“I’m sorry, honey.”
Sorry? What was Mr. Tall, Blond and Built apologizing for?
Oh. Honey. The lovers quarrel charade. “I’m sorry, t—”
Without any explanation, without any fanfare—without giving her a chance to play her part—he turned her in his arms, tucked a finger beneath her chin and tilted her mouth up to receive his kiss.
Alarm bells dinged inside J.C.’s head at the instant spark of raw, pulsing energy that cascaded through her at the touch of his lips on hers. Sheer, masculine power, bathed in untempered desire, assaulted her senses down to her most feminine core.
This was no polite, cover-story kiss. No make-believe apology. This was the physical expression of everything that had passed between them in those silent, heated moments at the bar.
Her breasts crushed against the rock-hard foundation of his chest as his big hands skimmed with needy roughness along everything they could touch. From a sifting tangle through her hair down over the flare of her hips where his long fingers dipped down to squeeze her bottom and lift her inexorably closer to his burgeoning male heat.
J.C. was on fire, crazy with the carnal madness he’d ignited in her passion-starved body. A feverish pressure pushed the tips of her aching breasts to rigid attention. The juncture between her thighs wept with unleashed need.
His lips were firm and demanding, seducing her mouth from corner to corner, and deeper inside. Stroking. Nipping. Asking. Taking.
J.C. clung to his shoulders and wrapped an arm behind his neck, running her sensitized palm back and forth across the erotic prickle of his short, soft hair. Her knees weakened at the unadulterated desire of their embrace. He wanted her. She wanted him. It was as if they’d been destined to share this kiss from the moment they’d been born. If she could crawl inside him right now, she would do it. Nothing less would quench the craving she had to possess him. To complete herself in the raging wildfire of this kiss.
The deep-pitched moan in his throat was the first reminder that this was insane. As he slowly lowered her and her feet touched the ground, she twisted her body in a last, pulsing bid for orgasmic release. But the fire was cooling.
By the time she came up for air, Juan and his sidekick were long gone. Sweetie’s hands were scorching the skin on her back inside her shirt. And she was ready to take her research into an intensely personal direction.
“Thank you,” she managed to eke out between swollen, unsatisfied lips that foolishly wanted more. “I guess I got in over my head.”
“You’re not the only one.” He touched his forehead to hers, his husky, breathy voice a potent echo of her own.
J.C. smoothed her palms over the sculpted enticement of his chest and pushed some much-needed breathing room between them. “One question.”
“Yes?” His gray eyes opened, revealing beautiful irises dappled with shades of silver and steel and charcoal.
“Who are you?”
4
SON OF A BITCH. Son…of…a…bitch.
Ethan swiped a hand across his mouth and flexed his jaw, trying to ease the white-hot fever that ravaged every cell in his body, leaving him feeling raw and unguarded.
Where the hell had that come from? That kiss? That sensual assault? That complete abandonment of purpose and control?
Instinct more than conscious thought had him scanning the parking lot and street beyond to verify that the woman’s two assailants had been smart enough to scramble for cover. Not that there’d been anything terrifically smart about what he’d just done.
All clear except for a couple strolling toward a pickup truck. Even the shadows seemed deserted, and the steady stream of traffic on the street running in front of Groucho’s Pub indicated no particular interest or threat.
He should be feeling relief that he’d cleared the scene without further incident. But he was still wound tighter than a coil. He was the only danger lurking beyond the flash of the neon signs now. He’d been ready to get inside this woman’s pants in a public parking lot because her body had proved to be every bit as lush as those lips. Ripe. Soft. Hot. Responsive.
Even now, as she realigned her clothing, her breasts rose and fell with her sharp, sweeping gasps for air. They weren’t big, but man, they had attitude, thrusting tips that were still at attention against the thin cotton of her sweater, begging him to touch. Her lips were a deep, rosy pink, stamped with the evidence of his need. They’d parted to reveal the sweet, soft interior he’d already feasted upon. She was a walking, talking seduction who disrupted every rational train of thought and standard course of action.
He’d just wanted her to be safe. He’d done the possessive tough-guy routine to get those wasted noncoms away from her. But he’d taken it too far. And, damn, if she hadn’t gone every step of the way with him.
There’d been nothing tentative in the way she’d opened her mouth beneath his and dug her fingers into his flesh and rubbed herself against him, waking every dormant male hormone he possessed. He’d taken everything she’d offered and demanded more, just like a greedy man who hadn’t had sex for one year, four months, two weeks and a handful of days. He hadn’t realized how much he missed it. He hadn’t been aware how successfully he’d shut down that part of himself to focus on solidifying his career. He hadn’t known how much he needed, craved, wanted….
Criminy. Ethan scraped his palm across the short crop of his hair and inhaled a deep, cleansing breath. He wanted to shove his hands into his pockets to stifle the urge to reach for her again, but there just wasn’t any extra room in his jeans at the moment. He’d have to do this through sheer willpower. He needed to reestablish control of the situation. Control of himself.
Gritting his teeth to keep anything stupid from flying out of his mouth, he bent his head to evaluate the turbulent shadows in her wide blue eyes.
“Are you okay?” The words snapped out with the efficiency of a dressing-down. He cursed his ineptitude at conveying patience and concern and tried again. “They didn’t hurt you, did they?”
She shook her head, smoothing those reddish brown wisps of hair he’d so thoroughly mussed back behind her ears. “I’m fine.”
Ethan ran his gaze up and down the trim curves of her body, inspecting her for any sign of injury. As she smoothed her sweater down over the waistband of her jeans, he noted that everything looked to be in exactly the right place. And that sure, sexy voice had claimed she was fine, but the tiny line marking the frown between her eyes could be an indication of emotional trauma. Trauma he might very well be responsible for. He wanted to touch that little line—kiss it, soothe it. But he clenched his hand into a fist at his side instead. “I’m sorry.”
She arched one eyebrow at him, replacing the frown with a question. “Our audience is gone. You don’t have to keep apologizing.”
“I’m not doing it for show.” He reached around her and picked up her carry-everything-size shoulder bag from the trunk of the car. Shaking loose the kinks from the canvas strap, he stepped back and held it out to her. “I just meant to help. Those two looked like trouble from the get-go. When a man traps a woman, and she’s pushing him away…” He briefly considered one of the sick games Bethany had tried to play on him once. Charging to her rescue had nearly held deadly consequences for the sap she’d used to provoke Ethan’s protective instincts back then. His fingers tightened around the strap. “You didn’t want them arou
nd, did you?”
She snatched the bag from his hand and hugged it to her stomach. “God, no. I mean, I can take care of myself nine times out of ten. But they were drunk and this isn’t the best-lit parking lot and…” The sassy bravado in her voice faded. “I’ll admit I was a little scared.”
Great. She’d been scared, and he’d shown all the sensitivity of a tank. “I didn’t mean to take advantage of your predicament. That kiss got way out of hand.”
“Do you hear me complaining?” There was something reassuring in her teasing tone and gentle smile that curled through Ethan’s veins and made him consider launching an assault on those lips all over again. “But I would feel a little more comfortable if I knew your name before we tried anything like that a second time.”
Ethan’s simmering libido slammed into his conscience and came to an abrupt halt. Smooth move, McCormick. How the hell did he ever think he could pull off a fake engagement if he couldn’t even get the basics of dating etiquette right?
Meet the girl first. Find out what they had in common, if anything. Share some drinks, some food, maybe even a movie or, God forbid, a dance. Then kiss her. Lips only. Groping and mussing and tongues down throats came way later in a relationship.
He wasn’t looking for a woman to get naked in the sheets with, anyway. He needed one who could play classy, ladylike—engaged—for a couple of weeks. But Ethan suspected he wasn’t scoring any points that would encourage her to say yes to his unorthodox proposition.
Who are you? She’d been standing there for several minutes, waiting for him to answer her question. Yep, McCormick, ultrasmooth.
“My apologies.” He retreated a step and extended his hand the way he should have in the first place. “I’m Major Ethan McCormick. USMC.”
“I’M…” J.C.’S WORDS choked on an uncharacteristic stutter of incoherent shock.
Uh-oh.
If her fingers weren’t locked up in Ethan’s firm grip, she would be jumping into her car, gunning the engine and putting distance between them as fast as her little red Camaro could take her.
